The Silver Yoke

by Roland Cheek

A wanted fugitive with a price on his head; a hopeless derelict driven by his past to the depths of degradation and self-loathing. It would be ridiculous to think such an individual could rock the foundations of one of America's foremost mining empires, right? But perhaps Jethro Spring is not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill Leadville drunk. Perhaps it's important that he owns a key mining claim in a district being rapidly developed by the ruthless Amalgamated Minerals & Mining Company. Perhaps also of importance is the fact that Jethro Spring has long acquaintance with fist and gun. Then provide key informatin that Amalgamated Minerals & Mining is a cornerstone of the mighty Burroughts' Empire--the very corporate behemoth who drove Jethro to his personal hell. Throw all those components into a boiling pot, then watch the explosions that follow!

The Silver Yoke, sixth and final novel in the Valediction For Revenge series chronicling the life of Jethro Spring, a man torn between cultures; The Silver Yoke revisits Southwestern Colorado, where the fugitive protagonist owns a valuable mining claim in a region being rapidly ravished by the mining behemoth originally responsible for murdering the claim's former owner, Jethro's friend Gunnar Einarssens.

278 pages, Paperback

First published November 28, 2012

About the author

There are, I suppose, febrile savants who reject any notion that a person can acquire the writing art outside those hallowed halls of academia. Yet storytellers captured audiences for millenniums before Oxford or Harvard were more than forest enclaves where wild turnips sprout.
There's dissent, of course, holding the cloistered academic life to be poor training grounds for the kinds of riveting stories audiences wish to hear or read. My particular PhD came from God's own university of wild places and wilder things. My Culture might best be described as the Campfire kind, backed up against the inky black of star-filled nights, regaling saucer-eyed guests with tales of wilderness adventure, while horses stomped at picket lines and coyotes howled at a rising moon.
My doctoral thesis came during three decades of narratives about those wild places and wilder things; wonders saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt; crafted for Outdoor Life, Field & Stream, and Sports Afield. My column was syndicated over two decades to 17 newspapers, and I hosted a coast-to-coast radio show with 210,000 listeners airing on 75 stations across America. Then I turned my attention to books: a baker's dozen novels and wildlife and adventure nonfiction titles, all self-published to great success, all flavored with real-life experiences.
What's my point? That one can have adventure AND learn to write very well indeed (despite academic disdain for anyone outside their comfortable inner circle); well enough indeed to tell the conventional publishing world to go to hell--that I'll publish my own stuff.
More successfully.
And at greater profit